I pop cooldowns on first drake to get some extra damage in, aoe damage is not that important in the fight I think. After drake is down and firewall went away we move the adds on shadron anyway so after 1 flamestrike blizzard and a LB on shadron they all die. If you aoe pre-flame wall you might have moving issues.

Your Tenebron tank can put Vigilance on the Sartharion Tank, he will then be able to Taunt nearly non-stop.

It was mentioned in the FFB thread to stack Illustration on Sartharion before Tenebron lands. Have people given much consideration to not doing that to ensure that Embrace of the Spider is off cooldown for the drakes? I'd always figured that having the extra spider proc (505 spellpower, 10 seconds) would outweigh the cost of ramping Illustration (average 100 SP across 10 spell hits), especially given how fast arcane and scorch can build it.

Tenebron takes 30 seconds to land. If Sundial/Embrace procs on the first Ice Lance on Sartharion, then expected it to proc 45 seconds later, or 15 seconds after Tenebron has landed (55 seconds later, or 25 seconds after, if you want to be realistic with proc chances).

The math in my head says it's better to have 200 spell power on every Frostfire Bolt and still get Sundial/Embrace in the last 30 seconds of Bloodlust than have 20, 40, 60, etc. spell power and Sundial/Embrace in first 15 seconds of Bloodlust. Sure, it's stacked with Potion of Wild Magic and Icy Veins, but if it really makes that much of difference, just save all your cooldowns till 15 seconds after Tenebron is down, then use them all at once:

/cast Icy Veins
/cast Combustion
/use Potion of Wild Magic
/use Mana Sapphire

I'm not sure how fast the fastest guilds out there kill Tenebron in 10-man, but our less-than-synergized group kills him in about 60-70 seconds average. I suppose if your group is killing him in 30 seconds, then you might go at this completely different, but for any group that takes longer than 45 seconds, the above seems to make sense to me, at least.

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but I'm levelling my mage (currently at 77), and I'm considering endgame specs. I'm wondering why Torment the Weak is such an important talent in builds like the fireball build? I was under the impression that raid bosses are immune to most slows and snares? Can I pretty much expect 12% more damage on a raid boss in most 25-man setups, or would I be relying on having specific classes/specs there to get any bonus from it?

You can pretty much just expect to have the necessary snare for TTW in any 25 main raid environment. The bosses are immune to the snare effect but TTW will still be triggered. For a list of what triggers TTW I recommend doing a search on the forum. It has been mentioned several times.

Hi, I have a question about gems (arcane pve)
Rwars keeps telling me that my meta should be the one that adds 21 crit and 3% more crit dmg (I do have 4 pieces of tier 7,5 so it all stack).
However, I can't see how that beat +21 SP and +2% intelect... anyone can confirm if what is rwar telling me an actual dps increase?

3% crit is way better than any meta gem. Look at the first page of this thread.

Also the 2% int is only better at extremely high intellect values. Something around the realm of 7000 intellect.

If Rawr is telling you that the Chaotic Skyflare is better, then its obviously an increase in dps, Rawr was specifically designed to tell you such things.

On a different note, with the upcoming changes to mage armor and arcane meditation, do any arcane mages have an idea of what we will be changing glyph and talent point wise. By that i mean i can see a few options. Firstly, We take the new 50% mana regen in talents, and replace glyph of mage armor (for those who use it) with glyph of molten armor. Or do we go 70% mana regen with mage armor and glyph, and spend the points from arcane med elsewhere. Im really struggling to decide what would be best. I am however going to try and run current content without either mage armor or arcane meditation to see how i fair first. My gear is somewhat decent-ish, still upgrading in 25 mans. Has anybody found mana problems with dropping all sources of self regen?

I found it impossible to keep up AB3[ABar,MBAM] with molten armor and 20% self-regen, but sutainable with glyphed mage armor. Due to lag issues I have since changed my playstyle to AB3AM and molten and find it both sustainable and about equal dps.

I used a WWS log of a recent Loatheb fight and filtered out every critical hit. I sorted all of this by spell and entered it into a spreadsheet. I took the total crit damage, actual ignite damage, and expected ignite damage, to find how much ignite damage I had lost.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...tfy19Iy8YC4Wcg
(Don't expect everything in there to make perfect sense. Some parts of it are very disorganized.)

Short summary of a 4:52 Loatheb kill:

Total damage: 1,672,723
Total crit damage: 1,110,935
Actual ignite damage: 392,257
Expected ignite damage: 444,374
Lost ignite damage: 52,117

There was a website months ago that parsed logs and did this same thing, albeit in a much easier manner. It would be interesting to compare the results. It is a significant amount of damage lost.

Currently, I am going through and color-coding everything based on the ignite interaction. The lines in red signify spells whose ignite damage was discarded. The light blue lines show the last ignite damage done before a rolling ignite stops (and these lines are shown in yellow, when a new application of ignite has started).

The far right column has the individual ignite ticks added up, with each being an alternate color to show which amounts are added to the rolling ignite. The bright blue number is the first tick after a new application of ignite. Following this is an alternating green/cyan. Each color shows the groupings of damage that were calculated by the game to reach the actual ignite tick. Then, the actual ignite ticks are highlighted yellow, and matched with their corresponding place in the log.

For instance, you can see that ignite ticked for 6003 damage, and then ticked again for 8619. A number of spells did damage inbetween these two ignite ticks. The spells that were included in the 6003 are colored cyan in this case. The numbers after that are green, and they are the spells that were calculated to reach 8619 damage for the next tick. To break it down:

Between the 6003 tick and the 8619 tick, four spells landed that crit: two frostfire bolts, a pyroblast, and a living bomb explosion:

Frostfire 13,058
Living Bomb 4,589
Frostfire 13,081
Pyroblast 10,443

The ignite damage of all of these is 16,468 (5223+1836+5232+4177). We add all of this up, minus the third Frostfire Bolt (5232) and we get 11,236. We then add in our last ignite tick, which was 6003.

(11236 + 6003) / 2 = 8619.5. And thus we know that the second Frostfire Bolt was the missed one. Of course, you could just look at the time stamps and get the same information:

19:56'41.906 Ignite
19:56'42.864 Frostfire Bolt
19:56'44.302 Living Bomb
19:56'45.335 Frostfire Bolt
19:56'45.399 Pyroblast
19:56'48.007 Ignite

It's not always the second spell that is skipped, nor does it always result in lost damage. Sometimes it can result in an entire ignite tick being added twice.

Unless you let your Ignite fall off at the end of the fight, you may be missing some of that expected Ignite damage. It's common to build 10k ignites on regular fights, a fight where you effectively have 100% crit rate could easily have an Ignite ticking at the end for large amounts. (This is why I end Loatheb with AB spam for 5s)

That is a valid point Mynak, and one of the things I'm looking at. In this particular case, the ignite debuff does fall off, as noted by its reapplication toward the end. If you look at the last few lines of the spreadsheet, you'll see the last Frostfire Bolt hit Loatheb. This applies Ignite. The calculated ignite damage is 4567. The ignite ticks for 2283, at which point Loatheb dies. Thus, the only ignite damage lost due to this is 2283.

I am working more on the spreadsheet to show the specific areas in which ignite ticks were lost. It will take some time though, so the spreadsheet (notably the last few columns) are not at all accurate. The lost damage, however, is accurate.

You really ought to use ZIT rather than try and recode the same functionality with a spreadsheet that works outside of the game. At least thats just my opinion.

If you want to have a more contextual and thorough analysis of how the case happens, then again, a spreadsheet is the wrong tool for it.

Was ZIT the add-on or the website that parsed logs? Do you have a link to a working version of that program? Unfortunately, I can't do a search for "ZIT" on the forums.

A spreadsheet is all I have at the moment to do the calculations on a large scale. It's just something to kill time for me, rather. It's pretty accurate, but it is time consuming to go through and calculate which individual ignites were eaten. I mean, it's easy to do a running total and see that by this time in the fight, X amount of ignite damage had been lost. But it takes more time to figure out which spells were overwriting others. In that regard, it's sort of a challenge.

ZIT (Zaldinar Ignite Tracker) works in-games. Havent tried it recently but i doubt it wouldnt work. It tells you exactly which ticks were extra ticks, and which were lost. The website you upload to was only if you wanted to compile information together, but by no means required. I don't think i ever got the page to work :/

In short, yes, if you are referring to the fire TTW spec 18/53. The old TBC fire spec is really FFB now. For playstyle, FFB and fire TTW play exactly the same way, you merely sub out frostfire bolt with fireball. Fire TTW is not a good starting raid spec though, due to its high mana consumption and need for hit.

In Rawr, where can I see my relative stat values? I can't seem to find them.

So with a certain (unknown?) amount of gear Fire (with TTW) passes arcane? I've been staying arcane thinking my only other choice for raiding was FFB. I've not been reading the forums in a bit but Fireball spec is back now, just with a gear requirement? So if I can be hit capped with 20k mana the Fireball spec is the way to go?

The three are close enough so that none are absolutely necessary, you can spec whichever playstyle you prefer.

What LiquidHAL said. Unlike TBC, all three specs (fire TTW, FFB, and arcane) are very competitive with each other for damage. I'm personally FFB because I'm an alchemist with a backlog of [Shattrath Flask of Pure Death], and I run a secondary 10man group which doesn't have a spriest or boomkin. Thus, I lack the hit to make a full changeover to fire TTW. One of my guildmates played around with arcane and decided he liked it a lot better than fire TTW or FFB; this same guy hated arcane back during T5.

Dedmonwakeen's SimulationCraft modeling put arcane is the highest spec followed by fire TTW and FFB, but the difference between each is around 100 DPS. That's very minor, to the point where your own skill can trump a higher DPS spec. Blizzard really nailed the DPS parity between the three specs (except for frost, but that's a whole other issue.)

I've read many (but not all) of the pages in this thread, and did not see my question here, nor did I see it in the arcane thread:

Has anyone done any math on what levels of maximum mana (and therefore intellect), you would need to sustain a max dps Arcane rotation (AB*x mbarr) and maintain your own mana with just evocate? with evocate and replenishment?

How about the other rotations, as given in the Arcane thread?

Should I post these questions in the Arcane thread?